THE WIND PHONE | GRIEF

Crossing the River of Oblivion — Do Our Loved Ones Forget Us After They Pass Away?

Lethe, the River of Forgetting and Wàng Chuān, the River of Oblivion

Remember the old saying that those we love are never dead as long as there is someone who still remembers them? While their name is still spoken around the dinner table, and stories of their lives are retold, they are still with us.

What if the reverse is true, too?

After my mother died, the worst part was the thought of her forgetting us.

I’m sure this seems ridiculous to those of you who believe in complete extinction after death, but hear me out. In my tiny little mind, death is simply the separation of the body from the spirit. Through the process of decomposition, the body returns to — or rather rejoins — the earth. Literally, “dust to dust.” Likewise, the spirit returns to its origin by rejoining the universal collective unconscious.

Yes, unconscious. Ahah! I can hear those objections raising already. How can memory exist within unconsciousness? Yes, there’s a flaw in my metaphor. Here’s the why — my inner-12-year old imagines the souls of the dead are simply on vacation somewhere, like a river cruise or a beach in Aruba.

No, not really.

Also yes. Sort of.

Sure, I can’t call or text them no matter how many times I pick up my phone and stare at the screen. Just because they aren’t here, though, doesn’t mean that there’re not anywhere.

They’re somewhere, and wherever they are, they’re doing just fine.

Let’s get back to the forgetting

My mother suffered for years with the increasing debility of vascular dementia. No one deserves it, and she certainly didn’t. Here’s a tiny glimpse of who she was.

She grew up working in the fields to in support of her family’s farm, then worked her way through college — the first in her family to get past 7th grade.

In fact her father never attended a day of school in his life. Orphaned at a young age, he had to make his own way early. Somewhere along the way he got hold of a arithmetic primer, though, and taught himself math. Soon he could do calculations in his head as fast as a calculator. This came in handy as he bargained with market owners and restauranteurs to whom he sold produce and meat.

He never learned to read or write. He brought his daughter — my mother — with him whenever a contract needed to be read and signed.

Back to Mom — after college she taught school for a while. Having helped raise a houseful of younger siblings, however, she was tired of herding kids. She preferred her gig as a long-distance operator for AT&T back when “trunk” calls had to be put through by hand. After that she moved into heavy industry where she worked her way up from the factory floor into management. A few years later she became an insurance fraud investigator.

On a blind date, arranged by one of her coworkers, she met a handsome, happy, earnest Technical Sergeant. He proposed a week later on their second date, and they married him two months later.

That man was my father. A few months after their marriage, the Air Force assigned him to a job in Paris. This meant he and my mom spent the first year of their married life in a small apartment in the 18th arrondissement.

In that era, U.S. military spouses overseas were not supposed to work, in order to free up jobs for the local citizens. Without a job to keep her busy, my mother spent her time in the national libraries in Paris, and later in London, doing research that would later find its way into four books.

That’s who she was.

Who dementia made her was an elderly woman in baggy sweatclothes, whose imagination filled in what her life was missing — trips to places that don’t exist anymore, visits from ancestors who were long dead.

Medications can bring miracles, though, and she was able to reconnect to reality, sometimes.

Sometimes not. One afternoon she asked me who the man at the dining room table was, and I explained it was my dad, her husband. She laughed and said, “well, I’ll be god-damned! I thought he was awful friendly!”

Then one day she was making her down the hallway of a mental health clinic on the arm of a nurse. When she turned around and found that I was following, she asked the nurse who I was.

It’s me, Mom. I’m your daughter.

The River Lethe started haunting me

After my mother passed away, I assumed that whatever part of her remained — her spirit, her soul, her essence — would still remember me.

Like many children, I had always taken for granted my mother’s love. It was the background of my life. My birth as her only child — one who arrived as a surprise in her 40s after she’d been told she couldn’t have children — made me the protected single chick in the nest. Not that we didn’t have our differences, but those were nothing compared to the rock-solid assurance of love.

After she passed away, I felt she was at a distance — like she was living in a distant city perhaps, on a different continent — but not completely GONE. Wherever she was, I assumed I’d still be precious to her. Assumed that if she could have looked into my eyes, she’d smile with recognition. Assumed she’d still be my mom.

Doubts and alternatives started suggesting themselves to me in the odd hours. You know this kind of sneaky thoughts — the ones that sidle sideways into your mind when you’re in the shower, or in the middle of the night when you should be asleep.

What if I still remembered my mother, but she no longer remembered me? If so, that would be the true and complete loss.

The metaphorical truth in mythology’s Lethe, the river of forgetting

Greek mythology tells us that it is one of the five rivers the dead encounter on their journey to the underworld. Those who drink from the river Lethe forget their live on Earth. They forget their passions and possessions. They forget their loves.

Chinese mythology tells us of Mèng Pó, the River of Oblivion. It has the same function — separating the dead from all the things they most cared about — the things that would keep them tethered to Earth.

Having read a few books on research into reincarnation — by University of Virginia Medical School’s Ian Stevenson and some of his peers — I understood that we need to forget our past lives. If we somehow fail to, we end up with one foot in our current life, and one foot stuck in the past.

This rarely enriches someone’s existence. In many cases it causes confusion, and carries a weight of sadness. It carries the loss from one life to the next. What kid deserves to be born with the sorrows and regrets from a different — functionally someone else’s — life?

Here is where the river Lethe comes in. The dead must drink from it to forget their past lives, so that they can be reincarnated with a clean slate. So too the dead must cross the Wàng Chuān — the River of Oblivion — in Chinese mythology, to be free of their past lives.

This is where I would love to bring this story around to a lovely, heartwarming conclusion. I would nod respectfully to where we began with the old saying, and the river.

I can’t seem to do it, though. The best I can offer is the reminder that we are all on the conveyor belt that eventually dumps us into death’s recycling bin. It’s part of being human. If we didn’t fear being born, we shouldn’t fear death either.

For a reminder of how little we understand what happens before birth and after death, let’s check out this advice from Anglo Saxon king Edwin’s advisor, as recorded by the Venerable Bede:

It seems to me thus, dearest king, that this present life of men on earth, in comparison to the time that is unknown to us, [is] as if you were sitting at your dinner tables with your noblemen, warmed in the hall … and one sparrow came from outside and quickly flew through the hall and it came in through one door and went out through the other …. what came before or what follows after, we do not know.

It’s beyond our pay grade. While on this side of the veil, we can’t know for sure what lies beyond.

If that’s the case, then why not believe what gives comfort? That beach in Aruba sounds pretty good right now.

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